I've been an AT&T customer for some time. Up until February of 2011 AT&T was less than desirable. Since then AT&T has been great. I'm an iPhone user and so is the rest of my family.

However there's an LTE iPhone right around the corner and I'm not sure I'm confident in AT&T in the LTE game. Seems like VZW has been very active getting spectrum while AT&T was waiting for the TMo merger. Now it seems like AT&T isn't very active. I wonder about AT&T future in LTE and if they can eventually catch up to VZW.

AT&T has been adding new markets ahead of schedule. So far, their speeds have been excellent in those markets, but we'll see how that goes once more customers own LTE phones. Here in the Dallas market, AT&T's LTE is faster with a stronger connection than Verizon LTE, but each market can be different.

I'm optimistic about AT&T's LTE. So far they've handled the deployment very well and the service has been solid. I use a Skyrocket, so I'm on LTE all the time, and speeds and uptime's are great. Battery impact is lower than expected too. AT&T has a much simpler network to run too, because LTE and HSPA are quite similar (GSM-like standards), while Verizon has to include both CDMA and LTE radios and chipsets in their phones. That leads to some of the outages and authentication problems that they've suffered over the past year and even the past 2 months.

Quote:I'm optimistic about AT&T's LTE. So far they've handled the deployment very well and the service has been solid. I use a Skyrocket, so I'm on LTE all the time, and speeds and uptime's are great. Battery impact is lower than expected too. AT&T has a much simpler network to run too, because LTE and HSPA are quite similar (GSM-like standards), while Verizon has to include both CDMA and LTE radios and chipsets in their phones. That leads to some of the outages and authentication problems that they've suffered over the past year and even the past 2 months.

Thanks Lisa,

So you're primary device is the Skyrocket? I'm in Philly and we don't have LTE yet but I think we're getting it soon.

How is the spectrum going to play in all this? Does AT&T have the spectrum to be able to compete with VZW? I know AT&T has been off to a slower start that VZW which I can live with. However from doing some research I keep coming up with that AT&T is not spectrum rich to have a large and rock solid LTE network. Is my information correct? Or is there something I'm missing?

Verizon claims that AT&T has a similar amount of spectrum as Verizon does, and should work harder to design their networks to use that spectrum efficiently. Personally, I think AT&T was crying wolf to get the FCC to agree to the T-Mobile merger. They seem to be doing just fine in their initial markets without it. At some point they will transition the existing GSM/EDGE/3G network to use LTE because LTE can also handle voice along with data (right now most LTE phones only use LTE for data, it will take a few years). In fact, that would be the logical evolution for Verizon as well, but that's a bigger change for them since they use CDMA rather than GSM.

In some markets like Chicago, AT&T has a single wide band for LTE rather than the more desirable double wide band (to put it in accessible terms), so LTE isn't as fast there as it in in Dallas where they have plenty of spectrum width.